


Cactus on a Mountain Peak

by miguelvdvelden



Category: - - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 23:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19283032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miguelvdvelden/pseuds/miguelvdvelden





	Cactus on a Mountain Peak

Resourceful, cantankerous, patient; proud but pragmatic; continually imperiled, yet seemingly indestructible; gorgeous to behold. She had calm hazel eyes, my mother, and lashes so thick her eyes seemed circumscribed with black eyeliner.

Our souls are human-shaped creatures of various colors, creatures also capable of taking on other physical forms, such as animals; my mother’s, Welita told me, often took the form of a mare. A tall black mare with short, glistening fur. Mine on the other hand, Welita said, was a moth. It was beautiful, but inaccessible, obsolete; a fine, white flying moth.

I could not see these things, of course. I was no vidente like Welita. I could not see them wth my own eyes, but sometimes in my dreams I could, in those moments when we look at the world through the very eyes of our souls.

When Mami died, her soul remained, and that beautiful black mare came to me in my dreams almost every night. Even then at the age of nine I knew that she couldn’t keep visiting forever, but I cherished those nights nonetheless, perhaps precisely because I knew they wouldn’t last. But when Mami’s black mare stopped coming to me in my dreams, I got sick.

It started with want. I would take everything I could find, no matter what it was or whose it was. I broke into a store one night to steal a feather duster, one with an intricate silver-and-wood handle. I took food from our cats and dogs and ate it myself as the animals whined with hunger. I forced my little brother to cut his hair and clip his nails, gathered the hairs and nail clippings in a small bag, and hid it under my bed. That was Phase One. It was a degenerative disease.

Phase Two ended with silence. I refused to speak a single word or to look into anyone’s eyes. To all the world it seemed as if I were ignoring them, but for me it was quite the opposite.

Phase Three was the final phase. I ate a bar of soap as I walked through the garden. In the barn, I saw one of my father’s mares had just given birth, so I painted my body with the foal’s blood and pressed myself against the horse’s side. She licked me as I imagined what it would feel like to bury myself in her womb.

When my father found me there on the barn floor, he finally started calling doctors. I came to them and they came to me; sometimes we met in the middle. Around this time, I moved into my little brother’s room and we shared a desk and a closet. Most nights, I ignored my father’s cooking and made my own meals, which I also forced my fat baby brother to eat.

None of the doctors knew what they were doing. They did not know this disease. I got medicine after medicine and my dad was advised to feed me garlic cloves and oranges. Only Welita knew the cause and the cure for my predicament, and she had long ago been banished from our home.

Welita came in my dreams before she came in real life. In the dream, we were somewhere very far away, and Welita was surprised and confused to see me there. She talked to me in my dream as I perched on her finger, answering her questions with flutters of my wings. The next day she was on our doorstep, and very content that I answered the door and not my father.

When my father got home, he was angry, but there was nothing he could do. Welita pointed out that I was skinny and my little brother fat, and that there was a little bag full of hair and nail clippings under my bed. Dad allowed her to stay, if only for a few days. It didn’t matter anyway though, not really, because the next day he went back to work and nobody saw him for a week, or even a month maybe (I wasn’t there when he returned). He was a train conductor, you see, and I think he took a job with the Trans-Siberian, or something similar.

Welita started her cure straightaway. She sat me down and asked me to recount every dream I‘d had since Mami died, and then she drank warm milk with honey and spit it out all over me. She only let me eat pumpkin soup and corn on the cob for three days straight.

“Esto es el problema, mijo,” she said to me at the end of my diet, as I picked the corn from between my teeth. “Tu alma se ha ido al horizonte y no piensa regresar.” My soul was headed for the horizon.

She explained to me that there was only one kind of soul or ‘spirit’—the good kind—but that spirits who were too far from their physical bodies could cause the bodies to get sick. A lot of people, she said, chain their souls to their bodies for this very reason, so the soul has no choice but to stay by the boy’s side. But when souls have no freedom or stimulation, they grow bored and vicious; that would not be my cure.

“Tu alma, mijo, está muy lejos, y se está olvidando de lo que significa tener un cuerpo, ser humano,” she said. I had to find my soul before it forgot entirely what it means to be human, and would no longer be able to find its way back. Or worse yet, before it crossed the horizon and I got so sick that I ate myself up and died.

“Con mi por hasi esey, Welita?” I asked her. I could not see souls like she could; all I knew was the physical world and the world of my dreams. How could I begin to look for my soul if I couldn’t even see it? But Welita told me not to worry and she sent me on my way. The horizon is beyond the mountains, she said to me; so first I had to cross the mountains.

I left with only a knapsack. It contained: a little bag of hair and nail clippings, a few sandwiches and other easy meals, water, a drawing book and a few pencils, a reading book, and a thin sheet I could sleep with. But on the first night it poured, so the following morning I left my heavy, soaked sheet dripping on a tree branch and from then on I slept with nothing but the sky between me and the stars.

I didn’t see much during that trip up the mountains, not during the day anyway; but at night the dioses of the mountain peaks came to me in my dreams. They felt cold to the touch because their peaks were too high to sustain warmth and life, but mostly the dioses were beautiful, compassionate and kind. The mountains had rules, they said, and if I followed them the dioses would reward me by leaving me alone or even occasionally by granting me a small gift of food or water.

Usually I followed the dioses’ rules, but when I broke them I was quick to pay the prize. The dioses were vengeful beings, dangerous and wrathful when disobeyed or deceived. Sometimes they rained hail storms on me or made the earth shake; once, they whispered into a monkey’s ear a suggestion to steal all my food, and simultaneously they whispered into a puma’s ear to attack me. When I survived these ordeals unscathed, it was only because another dios would come to my aid, seeing as the only thing the dioses hated more than disobeying humans was each other (and themselves).

I spent many years like this, years that I counted with scars on my body. The end of the mountain chain seemed never to draw near, and as I grew sicker my resolution to reach the horizon before my soul did waned. Then, nine years after I had set out from my home, I met Salvador. Salvador was not the first person I met on that trip, but he was the first one whose soul was neither chained to his body nor indistinguishable from the beasts of the forest. He was the first person I met whose soul stayed willingly by his side, day and night.

Salvador was the smartest person I’d ever met. He was roughly my age, but in the time it had taken me to ascend and descend a handful of mountains, he had traveled the world. I was convinced he knew more even than Welita.

“Did you know,” he told me once, “that across the ocean lives a god so powerful that there are no other gods to test his strength? Yet he has only two rules, and shows mercy to those who break them. They call him the All-Compassionate One over there, or sometimes God with a capital G, seeing as he’s the only one they know.”

Another time he told me the story if the first man to be born on that land across the ocean, a man who had craved but one thing growing up: freedom. When he came of age, he asked God to grant him freedom as a coming-of-age gift, and God, instead of giving him something new, took something instead; He took the man’s name. The man spent the rest of his life exercising his newfound freedom in search of his name, and passed on this constant dissatisfaction to all his descendants, all those people on that island across the sea.

I think I loved Salvador. It was difficult to know for sure, because I’d only ever loved my mother and my little brother, and this was a different feeling… nevertheless, I think I loved him. At the time, in any case, I was convinced that I did, though I did not think of us in those terms. I loved Salvador the way you love oxygen, and at night I would lie by his side with my arms on his chest and stare at the curves of his face until the moon went to sleep.

I traveled the rest of the mountain chain with Salvador by my side, and with him I was able to travel longer distances each day than I’d accomplished before that each year. Ragged cordilleras and barren mountain peaks passed us by as if they were images on a rug pulled clearly away from under our feet.

When we climbed the tallest mountain peak, we knew we were halfway to the horizon, and indeed there in the distance ahead of us we could see the horizon. It was like a large, semi-circular bay, and beyond it the waters were clear and black, the stars below as far away as those above. That night, from that mountain peak, I could see thousands of glow-in-the-dark, multi-colored souls make their way to the edge.

On the top of that peak there lived a scientist, and it was at this scientist’s home that Salvador and I rested for a few days and nights before embarking on the last leg of our journey. Our bedroom in the scientist’s house was lined with potted plants with each a personal name taped to the rim: ‘Miriana’ was a little flowering tree with a bark as black as charcoal; ‘Catalina’ was a thing with twisting roots; ‘Aminta’ was an aged, brownish aloe vera; ‘Magdalena’ was a shrub with little red flowers. ‘Salvador’ was the effervescent sapling of a palm tree. ‘Miguel’ was an unassuming, bulbous cactus with a single fruit in the middle.

“Salvador?” I said. The light of a full moon streaming in through the open windows painted his neck and the underside of his arms a dark silver. He looked at me with eyes as green and effervescent as the sapling that was named after him.

“Yeah?”

A single droplet of sweat gleamed on his collarbone.

“You know why I am heading for the horizon, but why are you?” I asked. “Your soul—I saw it in my dreams. Sometimes you appear to me as a stag, barely visible, but unmistakably there in the mist. Your soul hasn’t left you—so why are you leaving?”

The droplet on his collarbone dropped. His eyes moved like water, like eyebrows like knitting hands. He touched his fingertips to his cheekbone, then to mine. “I never made the decision to go,” he said softly. “I woke up one day, gathered my things, and left. The next day I met you in the woods and how could I turn back then?”

“But why did you get up and leave in the first place?” I asked again.

“Because…” he trailed off, then found his words again. “It was never my intention to go, to leave my family and friends behind, to disappear. It was like my body was acting of its own accord, and acting too fast for my mind to catch up and pull it back.”

I looked at him a while longer, until he closed his eyes, and then rested my face on his chest. He smelled like the tropics at the start of the rainy season; like hands and eyes lifted up to the sky. His heart beat

thump, thump, thump.

The following day was our last day on that mountain peak, so as a courtesy we made dinner for our host the scientist. He was an interesting man, if a bit weird, with shaking hands and stammering lips. I asked him about his work.

“W-well,” he said, “i-i-it’s nothing n-new really, just mmmore of the old. Trying t-t-to account for the unintentional, unav-voidable significant biases made by mmmy assumptions. Doing surveys, and w-well, referendums really, because I-I-I found out a long t-time ago that random sampling doesn’t really w-work.”

He went on to explain to us that his work proved that there was no such thing as objective reality; that natural laws all come with so many exceptions as to be entirely obsolete; that few, if any, things in nature have a natural, let alone logical, cause; and that systematic observation and experimentation have never discovered anything of significance. He concluded, though, that he was prone to both deliberate and unintentional mistakes that might have influenced those very same results.

In the end, Salvador and I left the mountain peak none the wiser as to what it was exactly that the man researched.

The first part of the rest of the journey was a long descent. We weaved our way through canyons littered with rocks like sleeping giants as the air warmed up around us. For days we descended as the climate warmed and grew more humid, the nights filled with nightmares and the skies filled with storms like buckets of electrified water poured over our heads. We didn’t see the moon for weeks, and then one day in the pouring rain I lost Salvador.

Not a hint of him was left, no proof that he’d ever been there at all, not a single hair or lingering smell or nail clipping. I tore my clothes and threw all my belongings in the river in frustration; I cried until I felt more destructive and alive than the monsoon unleashing itself over the earth. Every day and night after that felt like a monsoon in my mind.

I found myself hoping that he left willingly, that he wasn’t lost himself and looking for me somewhere out there. I reminded myself that he was never meant to accompany me to the horizon anyway, that it was mere chance that we met. Occasionally I would almost convince myself, and then I’d wake myself up thinking I could hear his voice.

“Hello, hello, hello?”

I got up and scrambled through the bush with grasping, clawing hands, looking for him during the day as I looked for the stag at night, the stag that had been him and now wouldn’t even show up in my dreams. I was sure I could hear him… “hello Miguel, I love you…” and then nothing more.

I kept going, kept reaching for the horizon, and that’s the only thing that makes me question it now; whether I truly loved him or not. Did I love him, or just need him? My throat burns at the thought of it, and I cling to the idea that that burn is a sign of my love.

There were fewer steps left to take ahead of me than there were steps taken behind me, and I was making longer distances every day than ever before, but still I had a long way to go.


End file.
